How KOTT works

One server, every layout

A pass usually has more than one way to run it — downhill, uphill, a reversed direction, a longer variant. KOTT hosts all of them on one server, and drivers switch between them in-game without reconnecting.

That matters more than it sounds. The alternative is a server per layout, which for a community of twenty means three servers with six people in each — and a server with six people in it reads as dead, so people stop joining. Keeping everyone in one place is the difference between a community that feels alive and one that looks abandoned.

A busy server that still races well

The usual problem with everyone in one place is that everyone gets in the way. KOTT handles that in two layers.

Battles are isolated. When two drivers are racing each other they collide with each other and pass straight through everybody else. Someone cruising cannot punt them off, and their battle cannot ruin someone else's hot lap. The same applies to timed laps.

And you can see through what you'd pass through. A car you cannot collide with still blocks your view of the road and your line, for no reason — so drivers can fade those cars out, at whatever strength they like, up to hiding them entirely. It follows the collision rules exactly, which means a car you could actually hit is never hidden from you.

The server decides, not the client

This is the part that matters most and the part that is easiest to skip. In Assetto Corsa almost everything is computed on the player's own machine, so anything the client reports is a claim rather than a fact.

KOTT doesn't take the claim. Each car's position is projected onto the track's racing line server-side, every tick — and that single projection is what drives finish detection, gaps, and lap validity. When a battle ends, the winner is re-derived from the recorded trace and compared against what the server reported. If they disagree, the trace wins and the result is flagged rather than quietly recorded.

Practically: a corner-cut doesn't become a lap record, and a disputed battle doesn't silently become someone's win. That's what makes a leaderboard worth caring about.

Timed laps that can't be gamed

A clean lap has exactly one route into existence: the player presses restart, gets teleported to the start, held for a three-second countdown, and released as the clock begins. There is no other path in the code that can start a timed lap — that's enforced by a build-time check, not a convention.

Going off track or teleporting to the pits invalidates the lap immediately, and contact during a hot lap is policed so someone can't ruin a run and have it count. Splits are recorded per sector, so a player can see where the time actually went.

Battles, without a queue

Anyone on the server can challenge anyone else. Accept, and both cars are placed at the start line, counted down together, and released — the rest of the server keeps driving around you, and collisions between the pair are isolated from everyone else.

Results feed a skill rating scoped to your community. Your drivers, your standings. There's a same-pair cooldown built in, so two friends can't inflate each other's rating by trading wins all evening.

A cat-and-mouse ruleset is available too, where the roles of hunter and runner swap between runs.

The HUD your players get

Delivered by the plugin — nothing for players to download or configure beyond having a current CSP. It shows live timing and gap, the countdown lights, a driver list with what everyone is currently doing, challenge prompts, and the results screen after a battle. Your community's name appears when they join.

Your community page

Your server appears on your own page within about a minute of its first heartbeat, with a live map of who's driving where, a connect button, leaderboards, lap history and driver profiles — all under your name, colours and logo.

You also get the tools that keep a community running: bans, crews, news posts, and delegated admins so you aren't the only one who can act.

What stays yours

The server. We have no access to your machine — we can't start it, stop it, or read its files, and everything KOTT needs travels over a heartbeat your server initiates. Your track and car choices are yours; your players are yours; your community page is branded as yours.

The plugin is open source under the AGPL, so you and your players can read exactly what it does. See /source.

Next

Operator guide — what you're agreeing to, including the constraints.
Install guide — the exact steps.
Apply — tell us about your community.